Westworld Season 3 Date Announced in Cryptic New Video
Westworld‘s beguiling third season just got a very cryptic date announcement video. How cryptic? We’re given not only the date when HBO’s expansive, ambitious sci-fi series returns but also a series of crucial dates within the show’s universe that seem to reveal more about the world outside the titular theme park then we’ve ever known about before. The dates include 6/12/19, the date of the first of a series of “Divergences,” this one taking place in Hong Kong, which saw political unrest and wide-scale protests. Or how about this one: 12/18/19 Divergence: Washington D.C. Impeachment of the 45th President of the United States.” This alternate reality in which Westworld takes place is similar enough to our own to be disquieting. The video goes on to cite the date 5/20/20, in which a third Divergence is named: “Indonesia: Ecological Collapse.” A narrator tells us we are already in a war, and that it’s already been lost. A fourth divergence is named on 12/09/24; the assassination of the president-elect of the United States in Buenos Aires. A thermonuclear “incident” follows in Paris, on 10/09/25, and then the start of the second civil war in Russia, in Moscow on 02/19/37. It turns out the larger world outside of the Westworld theme park is completely falling apart.
Then something happens that arrests all this turmoil: on 4/17/39 the “system” is initiated in an undisclosed location. It’s referred to as the ‘Solomon’ build 0.06, and the system seemed to have stemmed the tide of catastrophes engulfing the world until, on 2/27/58, another divergence in an unknown location created a critical event. That divergence, the viewer is told, is you.
And finally, HBO reveals that Westworld season 3 will return on 3/15/20. We already knew this season was going to be wildly different than the last, but this teaser is sort of blowing our minds.
Check out the utterly cryptic video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeEn609nkRs
The first two seasons of Westworld took place in the various parks—Westworld, The Raj, Shogunworld—where humans paid top dollar to do what they like with and to their robot hosts. Those hosts rebelled—with a few becoming sentient—at the end of the first season. By season two there was a full-blown war on, which ended with two of our main robot heroes Thandie Newton’s Maeve and Evan Rachel Wood’s increasingly violent Dolores (via the body of a look-alike Charlotte Hale, played by Tessa Thompson), breaking out into the real world.
The third season will apparently focus on Aaron Paul’s new character. The previous trailer introduces us to Paul’s seemingly regular guy while he narrated that the world is “rotting to pieces.” We see him working construction, alongside a robot partner. We hear him complain about how the promise for a better world was a lie.
Now we’ll know just what kind of season Westworld‘s third will be like, and in a few short months, no less.
Featured image: Westworld Episode 20 (season 2, episode 10/season finale), debut 6/24/18: Jeffrey Wright, Evan Rachel Wood. Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO
